Midnight Mass (Priest, #1.5)

by Sierra Simone

I was upset and frustrated, and she was my anchor. She was my harbor. She was every metaphor, nautical or otherwise, that made life worth living.

She was so beautiful to me that all I had to do was watch her, and life made sense again.

Life is a spiral. As long as we lived, we would keep moving forward. But on a spiral path, getting closer to your destination meant periodically passing the same things—emotions, issues, character flaws—over and over again, the way a person walking up a spiral staircase would continually find himself facing north every ten steps or so.

It almost became too painful to think about—Poppy having my child—not because it made me upset, but because it made me so incandescently happy.

A person is a collection of small things, of tiny invisible moments, of thoughts too inconsequential to share, of feelings that are too petty not to hide. Of glorious epiphanies too perfect to taint by speaking them out loud.

Our own liturgy was slowly unfolding between the two of us. Glimpses of happiness and easiness and the divine. And like a Mass, I knew it couldn’t be rushed, couldn’t be pushed along. It had to unfold at its own pace, take its own time.

So I held space for my lamb. And at the same time, I learned to hold space for my own grief and my own guilt.

“This isn’t punishment, Poppy,” I told her, with every ounce of certainty and love I could muster. “It’s a tragedy and it’s hard and it’s sad, but God doesn’t send pain to punish us or test us. Pain happens. Death happens. How we grieve and cope—that’s up to us.

“Being unhappy or doubtful isn’t a sin.”